First Net Print, November 23 1999
Second Net Print, November 25 1999
Third Net Print, October 30 2001

REPORT OF THE SECRETARY-GENERAL PURSUANT TO GENERAL ASSEMBLY RESOLUTION 53/35 (1998)

I.
INTRODUCTION

This report is submitted pursuant to paragraph 18 of General Assembly resolution 53/35 of 30 November 1998. In that paragraph, the General Assembly requested:

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On 16 November 1995, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) indicted Radovan Karadñiƒ (APresident of the Republika Srpska@) and Ratko Mladiƒ (Commander of the Bosnian Serb Army) for their alleged direct responsibility for the atrocities committed in July 1995 against the Bosnian Muslim population of the United Nations-designated safe area of Srebrenica. After a review of the evidence submitted by the Prosecutor, Judge Riad confirmed the indictment, stating that:

The United Nations had a mandate to deter attacks on Srebrenica and five other safe areas in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Despite that mandate, up to 20,000 people, overwhelmingly from the Bosnian Muslim community, were killed in and around the safe areas. In addition, a majority of the 117 members of UNPROFOR who lost their lives in Bosnia and Herzegovina died in or around the safe areas. In requesting the submission of the present report, the General Assembly has afforded me the opportunity to explain why the United Nations failed to deter the Serb attack on Srebrenica and the appalling events that followed.

In my effort to get closer to the truth, I have returned to the origins of the safe area policy, discussing the evolution of that policy over a period of several years. I have drawn the attention of the reader to the resolutions of the Security Council and to the resources made available to implement those resolutions; I have reviewed how the policy was implemented on the ground, as well as the attacks that took place on other safe areas: Sarajevo, Gorañde, Bihaƒ. I have reviewed the debate that took place within the international community on the use of force and, in particular, on the use of air power by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). I have also reviewed the role of the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) in the fall of Srebrenica, and in the almost-forgotten case of ðepa. Finally, I recall how, having failed to act decisively during all of these events, the international community found a new will after the fall of Srebrenica and how, after the last Serb attack on the safe area of Sarajevo, a concerted military operation was launched to ensure that no such attacks would take place again.

In reviewing these events, I have in no way sought to deflect criticism directed at the United Nations Secretariat. Having served as Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations during much of the period under review, I am fully cognizant of the mandate entrusted to the United Nations and only too painfully aware of the Organizations failures in implementing that mandate. Rather, my purpose in going over the background of the failure of the safe area policy has been to illuminate the process by which the United Nations found itself, in July 1995, confronted with these shocking events. There is an issue of responsibility, and we in the United Nations share in that responsibility, as the assessment at the end of this report records. Equally important, there are lessons to be drawn by all of those involved in the formulation and implementation of international responses to events such as the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. There are lessons for the Secretariat, and there are lessons for the Member States that shaped the international response to the collapse of the former Yugoslavia.

Before beginning with the account of the events in question, it is important to recall that much of the history of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina will not be touched upon at all in the body of this report. The war began on 6 April 1992. Most of the territory captured by the Serbs was secured by them within the first 60 days of the war, before UNPROFOR had any significant presence in Bosnia and Herzegovina. During those 60 days, approximately one million people were displaced from their homes. Several tens of thousands of people, most of them Bosnian Muslims, were killed. The accompanying scenes of barbarity were, in general, not witnessed by UNPROFOR or by other representatives of the international community, and do not form a part of this report. In addition, the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina included nine months of open warfare between the mainly Muslim forces of the Bosnian Government and the mainly Croat forces of the Croatian Defense Council (HVO). This fighting, although important to understanding the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina, did not generally involve the safe areas that are the central focus of this report. The record of that conflict, therefore, does not appear in this document.

At the outset, I wish to point out that certain sections of this report may bear similarity to accounts of the fall of Srebrenica that have already appeared in a number of incisive books, journal articles, and press reports on the subject. Those secondary accounts were not used as a source of information for this report. The questions and account of events which they present, however, were independently revisited and examined from the United Nations= perspective. I hope that the confirmation or clarification of those accounts contributes to the historical record on this subject. I also wish to point out that I have not been able to answer all the hitherto unanswered questions about the fall of Srebrenica, despite a sincere effort to do so.

This report has been prepared on the basis of archival research within the United Nations system, as well as on the basis of interviews with individuals who, in one capacity or another, participated in, or had knowledge of the events in question. In the interest of gaining a clearer understanding of these events, I have taken the exceptional step of entering into the public record information from the classified files of the United Nations. In addition, I would like to record my thanks to those Member States, organizations and individuals who provided information for this report. A list of persons interviewed in this connection is attached as Annex 1. While that list is fairly extensive, time, as well as budgetary and other constraints precluded interviewing many other individuals who would be in a position to offer important perspectives on the subject at hand. In most cases, the interviews were conducted on a non-attribution basis to encourage as candid a disclosure as possible. I have also honoured the request of those individuals who provided information for this report on the condition that they not be identified.

All of these exceptional measures that I have taken in preparing this report reflect the importance which I attach to shedding light on what Judge Riad described as the darkest pages of human history.